Workshop Nairobi

Description

Located in the heart of Nairobi’s furniture district, the Workshop brings tools, skills and business to local craftsmen.

Workshop Nairobi was created in 2015 to bring together local artisans and furniture manufacturers to create modern, hand-crafted furniture using locally sourced, sustainable materials. The Workshop aims to be a space for creative and collaborative thinking, training, and designing, to develop local talent and open new markets for Kenya’s furniture industry.

The Workshop helps Kenyan craftsmen in three ways:

Innovate new designs through partnerships, access to tools and machinery, and a “virtual” resource center.

Develop skills by holding training classes and seminars on design and business operations, and by creating a “certification” process to identify skilled craftsmen.

Market products through online, local and export sales, and providing quality assurance and product guarantees.

Our mission is to help small-scale furniture manufacturers improve the quality and innovation of their products and creating new markets for their goods. We at Workshop Nairobi believe in the talent, ingenuity, and passion of entrepreneurs everywhere and seek to support them by creating partnerships with designers and by helping to grow the customer base for high-quality, locally sourced and produced Kenyan furniture.

We are currently incubated at the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, a US-registered 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to poverty alleviation through rigorous research and applied behavioral science. Support for Workshop Nairobi comes through generous funding from the World Bank and the Innovation Growth Lab.